The Texas Supreme Court this week will tackle the thorny issue of homeschooling and evaluate the state’s authority to verify whether minimal educational standards should apply regardless of where children get their classroom instruction. With about 300,000 Texas children being home schooled, it’s essential that everyone understand those standards.

This newspaper agrees with an El Paso appeals court ruling regarding the apparently lax standards that a couple, Laura and Michael McIntyre, applied when they said they were home schooling their children. Close relatives expressed concerns about whether the McIntyre children were receiving any instruction at all. One relative alleged that the family discounted the need for rigorous education because they were awaiting the rapture.

One of the couple’s children ran away at age 17, saying she wanted to “attend school.” El Paso public school administrators were rebuffed when they asked the McIntyres to produce documentation that their children were receiving the “bona fide” education that state law requires.

Belief in the impending rapture is a constitutionally protected religious freedom. If this were the sole issue, the state would have no grounds to intervene. But the parents appeared to be using a religious rationale to justify truancy.

It gets tricky whenever the state tries to define what minimal instruction consists of. Private schools and home schooled children don’t have to take standardized tests. And public schools sometimes allow students to advance to higher grades even after failing standardized tests.

The bottom line here is that education is a public good. There is harm to children when they are under-educated, but there is also harm to society. Under-educated children have a far higher chance of living in poverty and becoming dependent on welfare and subsidized housing.

The state’s oversight role is, in fact, in all taxpayers' interests, which is why the Texas Supreme Court should uphold the appeals court’s ruling, and the Legislature should get to work making clear what a “bona fide” education is.

Correction on Nov. 14: A previous version of this editorial misidentified one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. She is Laura, not Lauren, McIntyre.